960.jpg)
It's part of their Leo Burnett Brazil advertising campaign "The Important Thing Is To Be Healthy"
And while I agree with many who have qualified the tag-line before me "As healthy as you can be eating a sugary breakfast cereal every morning," (Nutritional data here),
I love the vision of kids just being themselves with no shame imposed on them.
The strict gender roles about what boys can do, wear, and play with still seem more rigid than those for girls. After all, girls wear pants, but you don't often see boys in skirts or dresses (and if you do, it's a BIG deal.)
This ad moves us forward. All of us.
And that's a great thing.
Our world is changing!
Namaste,
Lee
Thanks to Suzanne for the heads-up on this one!
7 comments:
I think there were the same sorts of restrictions on boys when I was young as now, but at the time girls were even more restricted than the boys, so that the boys seemed to have it good! Now that girls can wear what they like and play with trains and cars, it's more than time for boys to be given similar freedoms.
So yay for this advert. There's worse things in life than sugary cereal and buggering up people's lives with stereotypes is one of them.
Is it a step forward? The tagline, "The important thing is to be healthy" implies that there is something wrong with this image (boy playing with dolls), but it's okay that he's doing that "wrong"/ "bad" thing, as long as he's healthy.
The ad "accepts" the boy playing with dolls, but it points out that, well, we all know this is not the way it's SUPPOSED to be, but we're letting it go this one time.
It's a tiny step forward, because the "wrongness" is "accepted" (or tolerated), but the fact that we're reminded this is "not right" pushes us back almost to where we'd started.
'After all, girls wear pants, but you don't often see boys in skirts or dresses (and if you do, it's a BIG deal.)' I was just thinking about this the other day and the fact that trousers have become a female item of clothing as much as they are a male one, but skirts are always female (except for kilts and people outside of Scotland still don't trust them). How crazy it must have been to live in a time when wearing trousers caused a scandal because they were mens clothes.
WOOT!
My local library has computer games for the kids to play. One of them is a Dora the Explorer game. The last time I was there my son and two other boys were crowded around the computer playing the Dora game... basically a computer version of paper dolls.
I agree with Cris... I think it is a quite homophobic add. Here in Brazil people use to say things like "he is ugly, but the important thing is that he is healthy"... it implies that there is something wrong, but "as long as the child is healthy, that's ok ("we can tolerate it")".
Bye, Ane
Ane, thanks for the cultural context. Well, OUT of context, from our USA culture, the ad seems like a big step forward. But IN context, I guess it's a big disappointment.
Sigh.
Once again I'm grateful for the global scope of this community we've created here.
Namaste,
Lee
Post a Comment